1% Challenge: Cider with Rosie, by Laurie Lee

If my first read in my 1% Well-Read Challenge was not the experience I had hoped it would be, my second read made up for it. Cider with Rosie, by Laurie Lee, was exactly what I was looking for. There is something so satisfying about finding the right read at the right time. I was looking for something with a touch of nostalgia, but nothing cloying or deeply sentimental. Laurie Lee’s description of growing up in a small village in England immediately after the First World War struck the right chord with me. Although the trappings of traditional village life are very different from what I experience in my immediate surroundings, living and working in a rural community still allows for some observation of the workings of small, close-knit communities. Activities, transportation and community norms may change, but the reliance on belonging, family, neighbors and the regularity of the immediate and known sphere have not.

Lee’s use of language is beautiful. While he utilizes a certain romanticism found in memoirs of the period, his metaphors and descriptions seem to always throw the reader slightly off-guard. Images and adjectives were not always what I expected. These choices, as well as some of the storyline, rescue the reminiscences from being trite or ordinary. As an example, one of my favorite images in the book comes from Lee describing his mother and older sisters, as viewed by his very young self:

My Mother and sisters sailed past me like galleons in their busy dresses … How magnificent they appeared, full-rigged, those towering girls, with their flying hair and billowing blouses, their white-mast arms stripped for work or washing. At any moment one was boarded by them, bussed and buttoned, or swung up high like a wriggling fish to be hooked and held in their lacy linen.

I don’t know if I’ve read a better description of that mix of love and terror a young child feels in the presence of adored and overwhelming older relatives. I could feel the tug between wanting the grounding affection of his family, and the growing realization of and need for independence. I remember the same emotions from my childhood, in relation to my aunts and uncles as they moved through young adulthood. Lee captured not only the strength he found in his sisters and mother, but also the threatening awe they inspired.

Lee’s memoir continues, up to the point of his household disintegrating as sisters married and he left the confines of the primary school. He presents memorable and well-realized characters along the way, and many times I could image acquaintances stepping in for village residents (with some updates). Small minds, large dreams, endless summers and frigid winters all collide with familiar tensions.

Although the village Lee described reminded me forcefully of one I know well, there was at least one glaring difference that troubled me, Lee and his contemporaries knew their surrounding landscape with the same intimacy as we might know our own backyards. What have we lost, I wonder, in reducing our scale so? How many of us could find our way across even a few fields, through a small wood, or over a hill to reach our destination? Do we have any idea what we would find along the way? I think our disconnection diminishes us, and makes commonplace surroundings seem difficult to understand. Perhaps our personal and community lives would be richer if we experienced a similar connection to our environs. Perhaps we’d also make different choices.

Cider with Rosie is the first book in a trilogy, and I will probably read at least one more book. I don’t know about the third, as he gets older. I’m not a huge fan of young male coming-of-age stories (for Salinger, give me Franny & Zooey over Catcher in the Rye any day), but too often I make up my mind before I should. My next assignment, however is to get cracking in my 1% list. Up next: An Artist of the Floating World, by Kazuo Ishiguro.